You know that person on the bus.
Everyone else is murmuring into their phones and then one voice slices through the carriage: “NO, I told them to cancel the direct debit! Yeah, the BANK! Can you hear me now?!”
You clock them instantly: the Loud Phone-Talker. Not just louder than average, loud enough that by the next stop you know their banking crisis and half their family tree.
We normally file them under “rude” and move on. But when you line up what we know about hearing, attention and how the brain handles phone calls, a different story appears. Loud phone-talkers aren’t a separate species. They’re what happens when normal biology, technology and personality collide in the wrong place.
How phones break your inner volume control
In face-to-face conversation, your brain constantly auto-adjusts your voice. You see how close the other person is, read their tiny reactions, hear your own voice in the room. That feedback loop keeps you at roughly “acceptable indoor volume”.
On the phone, most of that vanishes. You’re talking to a piece of glass. There’s no sense of distance, no visible wince when you shout, and your own voice sounds oddly inside your head instead of out in the air.
Most people muddle through. But for some, that broken feedback loop means their internal volume slowly drifts upward, especially when they’re stressed or the call feels important — and nothing pushes it back down.
The noise reflex that turns us into megaphones
More than a century ago, researchers discovered the Lombard effect: when background noise rises, humans automatically speak louder and exaggerate their speech to stay intelligible.
Now think about the Loud Phone-Talker’s natural habitat: echoey train cars, tiled coffee shops, crowded platforms. These spaces constantly trigger that reflex. Their brain hears more noise, so their voice jumps a notch, then another.
Most of us still feel the room and rein it in. The classic Phone Shouter doesn’t. Their attention is locked onto the fragile voice in their ear, not the real humans one metre away. When the environment gets louder, so do they, with no brake.
Personality and hearing: the hidden accelerants
First, personality. Some people are simply wired to talk more. Communication researchers even use the term talkaholism: they speak a lot, change topics quickly, and don’t notice how much space they occupy. Put a smartphone in their hand, a pocket escape from boredom and awkward silence, and they’ll happily narrate their lives from seat 23B.
Second, hearing. Mild, age-related hearing loss often starts in the sound range phones rely on. If you’re missing part of the signal, your brain does the primitive thing: it turns you up. To the rest of the carriage it looks like arrogance. Inside that person’s nervous system, it’s damage control: “If I don’t speak louder, this whole call will fall apart.”
The uncomfortable twist
Here’s the unnerving part: the science suggests loud phone-talkers are less a bizarre minority and more an extreme version of all of us.
Take an anxious call, patchy reception, a noisy carriage, a brain locked onto a fragile connection, maybe a hint of hearing loss and almost anyone’s voice can slide into broadcast mode.
The next time someone is bellowing into their phone, it’s still fine to be annoyed, to move seats, even to ask them calmly to lower their voice. But it might help to know you’re not just hearing bad manners. You’re listening to a very human system – ears, brain, technology and personality – briefly spinning out of its comfort zone.
